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Copyright is a big deal. There’s hardly a single computer user who hasn’t faced the possibility of using or creating content that infringes copyright. And it is a huge deal in the area of Buddhist texts, where many texts are protected under some form of copyright law. I’m going to make a somewhat complex argument here, so let me state my conclusions up front.

I think copyright is a bad idea. I think we would be better off without it. But regardless of whether it has certain applications in some areas, it contradicts fundamental Buddhist principles and should never be applied to Buddhist scriptures.

Why is copyright a bad idea?

The basic premise of copyright is this: that we can ensure creative incomes by legal means. The purpose of copyright is to provide a legal avenue to ensure the rights of original creators are respected. That is to say, a copyright notice is nothing if it is not an implicit legal threat. It says, if you don’t comply, you are a criminal and we will take you to court. The problem is not just that these threats don’t work, it is that they prevent us from even considering more humane and socially-based measures.

When copyright laws evolved over the past few centuries, we lived in a completely different world. Copying took effort, and it could be reasonably contained. But for the past 20 years or so, the combined effort of human ingenuity and industrial output has created billions of machines that can copy incredibly fast, and has put those machines in the hands of most of the people on this planet.

Then you say to everyone, “Please don’t use these machines for copying!” Have you heard what happened in the Garden of Eden? Let me make a huge leap and guess: people copy stuff anyway.

Have a look at how many copyright takedown notices Google gets:

Yep, that’s over a million requests every day. For one company. And see how it’s soared over the past few years, at the same time as the protectors of copyright have pushed hard for creating ever more draconian laws.

There aren’t that many bad people in the world. If the law says that millions of people are criminals, it’s the law that is wrong, not the people. Any law that is broken this often is ill-conceived.

It seems to me that successful laws are of two kinds. You either have laws that govern things that are very exceptional, only a few people do them, and they fall well outside what are considered acceptable; such as murder, theft, and the like. In such cases, you ban the thing and impose substantial penalties. But other kinds of laws govern things that most people do, or might do. It’s not so much a matter of prohibiting things because they are wrong, but managing them in the interests of the public good. I’m thinking of things like speeding tickets, or building regulations, or non-smoking zones. In such cases we try to nudge people towards a better behavior. You tweak them, making them more stringent, together with an education component, and gradually build a social expectation of acceptable behavior.

The problem with copyright law is that it tries to apply the absolutism which is appropriate for the first kind of law to something that should be managed by the second kind of law. You can’t just make people stop copying things they like. It’s never going to happen. Maybe you could make them modify their behavior, but until you give them a way of doing that it is a losing battle.

The intended purpose of copyright is not to protect corporations, but to protect the work of creators. But here’s the thing. Before I was a monk, I was an original creator. I was a songwriter; and I lived among creative artists. For 6 or 7 years pretty much all my friends were writers, poets, actors, musicians, painters, or dancers. And I can’t recall a single time when copyright law was actually relevant to anyone. True, I made a small amount from song royalties, but it never affected our lives all that much.

And anyway, even if you, as a struggling artist, became aware of a copyright violation, what could you do about it? Take a publisher or record company to court? Good luck with that. What you’d do, if anything, is contact the alleged violator, and if they didn’t do as you asked, you’d grumble about it. You don’t need a legal system for that.

Copyright becomes relevant when you step up into the realm of corporate sponsored art. You sign a contract, giving the copyright ownership to a company. For us it was a record company, otherwise it might be a book publisher, a movie studio or whatever. Then they own the copyright, and you get a small percentage (in our case, about 10%—so much for protecting the rights of creative artists.) If there is a copyright violation, the company goes to court, because they can afford to.

Now, in some cases this can be justified. For example, it’s really expensive to make a movie. You need companies to provide the financing and bear the risk. But this is a purely contingent fact, and it changes depending on technology. In the past, for example, a publishing company was needed to produce books. Gradually, technology has eaten away at the specialist services that publishers can offer. Typesetting, proofreading, design, marketing, printing, distribution: all these can now be done easily by individual authors, who can then keep full copyright control over their works. On Amazon, nearly 50% of creator revenue for genre titles is now from self-published books. So the fact that producing some kinds of creative work requires large companies and legal protection does not mean that such protection is necessary everywhere.

The notion that copyright exists to protect creators withers when you consider the devastating impact that the radical expansion of copyright has had on works whose creators have died. Here’s some background on this, from Professor James Boyle of Duke Law School:

Congress eliminated the benign practice of the renewal requirement (which had guaranteed that 85% of works and 93% of books entered the public domain after 28 years because the authors and publishers simply didn’t want or need a second copyright term.) And copyright, which had been an opt-in system (you had to comply with some very minor formalities to get a copyright) became an opt out system (you got a copyright automatically when you “fixed” the work in material form, whether you wanted it or not.) Suddenly the entire world of informal and non commercial culture — from home movies that provide a wonderful lens into the private life of an era, to essays, posters, locally produced teaching materials — was swept into copyright. And kept there for the life of the author plus 70 years. The effects were culturally catastrophic. Copyright went from covering very little culture, and only covering it for a 28 year period during which it was commercially available, to covering all of culture, regardless of whether it was available — often for over a century. Unlike Fahrenheit 451, the vast majority of the culture swept into this 20th century black hole was not commercially available and, in most cases, the authors are unknown. The works are locked up — with no benefit to anyone — and no one has the key that would unlock them. We have cut ourselves off from our own culture, left it to molder — and in the case of nitrate film, literally disintegrate — with no benefit to anyone. The works may not be physically destroyed — although many of them are; disappearing, disintegrating, or simply getting lost in the vastly long period of copyright to which we have relegated them. But for the vast majority of works and the vast majority of citizens who do not have access to one of our great libraries, they are gone as thoroughly as if we had piled up the culture of the 20th century and simply set fire to it; and all this right at the moment when we could have used the Internet vastly to expand the scope of cultural access.

That this extension of copyright is useless and harmful is not just the opinion of a few radicals. In 2002 a team of 19 economists, including 4 Nobel laureates, submitted an analysis to the US Congress on the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, where they concluded that, “Taken as a whole, the authors believe that it is highly unlikely that the economic benefits from copyright extension under the CTEA outweigh the additional costs.” And yet, it is still with us.

Here’s a stunning graphic that shows just how deep a hole in our culture copyright law has dug. It’s from a paper titled “How Copyright Keeps Works Disappeared”, by Paul J. Heald of the University of Illinois College of Law. This graphic shows how books published before the magic public-domain date of 1923 are far more available than those published after. Essentially, publishers make texts available for a decade or two, and then they languish unread until they enter public domain.

If the law doesn’t really protect creative artists, then who does it protect? Copyright law is an instrument of capitalism, and like all instruments of capitalism, it aims to make the rich richer. Who is making all the fuss about copyright? Farmers in Kenya? Street cleaners in Manila? Bus drivers in Brazil? No, it’s the owners of massive, wealthy corporations.

The practical result of copyright, I allege, is to take money out of the hands of creative artists and their fans, and concentrate it in the hands of the rich, who control the means of production. Think about it: why was copyright law created in the past 300 years or so? Isn’t that the time when the printing press became used? A printing press allows mass copying of writing, but it does so at considerable expense, in terms of the physical machinery and space, but also in terms of time and experience, and carefully learned craftsmanship. When the laws were created, this served a purpose, as the capital—printing presses, distribution networks, and the like—was necessary to propagate work. So a class of company, known as “publishers”, was created to deal with these things and enable the printing and distribution of books. But now, the measurable effect of copyright law is to prevent people from accessing content. And the reason for this is straightforward: the whole idea is based on a state of technology that simply doesn’t exist any more.

Profit arises from the demand for a good whose supply is limited. In the 20th century, the supply of intellectual content was limited, and so it was a valuable commodity. Now it’s not, despite the efforts of content providers to keep it so. Information is the cheapest thing in the world; much cheaper than water. The economic thinking that underlies copyright law is deeply disconnected from the real world.

I have looked for demographic data on the economic effects of copyright law and haven’t been able to find anything, so allow me to make an unsubstantiated hypothesis. If anyone knows of some information, please let me know. But here is my thesis: the flow of money from copyright is, on the whole, from the poor to the rich; from the colored to the white; from the female to the male; from the underdeveloped countries to the developed; and from the young to the old. Prove me wrong!

If we are to retain any form of copyright law, we should develop it like the second kind of law I mentioned above, in a gradual and pragmatic way, together with an education process.

One model would be to make copyright law more like patent law. It would be opt-in, so a creator would have to make an application for copyright, which spelled out the reasons for applying copyright in this instance. If the application was successful, a percentage of earnings, say 10%, would go to the regulatory body, thus providing funding for it. This would ensure that copyright is only applied for substantive works, and works where the creator genuinely expects that they will lose more than 10% of their earnings by copying. The copyright would apply for a reasonable period, say 20 years, as is the case with patents.

As long as humans have existed, they have created. The first signs of human creative activity are nearly 100,000 years old. Creativity is an expression of the human spirit: it doesn’t belong to capitalism. No matter what you do, people will create. People all over the world are creating, writing, painting, playing music, and they couldn’t care less about copyright. Copyright law is not about fostering creativity. It is about keeping alive an economic order based on 20th century technology, which ensures that a small circle of the rich get the bulk of the economic gain from creative activity.

What about Buddhism?

You’d think that it wouldn’t need stating, but evidently it does: Buddhism is about letting go, copyright is about holding on.

Even if we can accept a case for certain forms of copyright in certain spheres of life, how should that apply to Buddhism? After all, Buddhism not merely survived, but flourished for thousands of years before copyright came on the picture. Perhaps some historical perspective is in order.

The first question, which can be dealt with swiftly, is whether copying is stealing under the Buddhist precepts. The answer is no. Stealing in Buddhism requires that the owner be deprived of something. Copying is not taking. You could argue that the creator is indirectly deprived of income, but that is irrelevant. There are plenty of ways to indirectly deprive someone of income; I could set up a rival business, for example. I might even do that out of malice, to deliberately harm you. That may not be a nice thing to do, it might even be illegal, but it has nothing to do with stealing. Of course, breaking copyright is against the law, which is a separate matter; but it is not breaking precepts.

Incidentally, many monastics, like most people in developing countries, use pirated software all the time. If copying was stealing, they’d risk falling into an expulsion offence. However, even though there is no expulsion offence for using the software, it is still often illegal. This is one of the many reasons why monastics should use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), such as Linux. This also highlights one of the often-overlooked details of copyright history. Software is an unusual industry in that extensive copying has existed as long as the industry has. People have been using millions of pirated copies of Windows and other software as long as they have been around. Yet software companies are thriving, and making record profits.

For the Buddhist tradition, as indeed for most ancient traditions, there is no notion of intellectual property. People borrowed and copied all the time. Buddhist texts are full of cases where monks or nuns are quoting verbatim passages from the Buddha or others, and there is never an issue of ownership. That’s because the Dhamma is not about ownership. It’s about helping people let go of suffering.

The Dhamma was felt to be, if anyone’s, the Buddha’s. The Buddha encouraged his students to teach the Dhamma in their own language; so that, from the earliest days, the Dhamma existed in multiple translated forms, all of which were considered to be the words of the Buddha. When the texts were later translated into Chinese and Tibetan, they continued this tradition, regarding these texts as “the word of the Buddha” in exactly the same sense as the “original” scriptures (which were themselves translations from one Indic dialect to another).

However, in modern times agreements such as the Berne convention ruled that translations should be considered to be original creations. I think this is a mistake. I’ve done original writing, and I’ve done translations, and they are very different kinds of things. You can, for example, get a computer to do translation, albeit poorly, but no computer can write a meaningful original article.

Be that as it may, it is clearly contrary to the entire Buddhist tradition. And needless to say, no-one thought to consult Buddhists about this. It was a law made in Europe by some rich white men, who were not even thinking that their acts might affect an ancient spiritual tradition from the East. Yet this law has been adopted by many Buddhists who use it to control how translations are made. No longer are Buddhist scriptures regarded as the “word of the Buddha”, but as the property of individuals, or more likely, of corporations. This tendency is found mostly among western translators; Asian translators mostly stick closer to the original spirit, although they sometimes use restrictive licences of various forms.

Not only are translations regarded as owned by individuals, even the original texts are frequently subject to copyright claims. You’d think that a millenia old text would be pretty firmly in the Public Domain, but apparently many publishers of original texts don’t think so. Going beyond the extremely broad scope of copyright law, they publish licences with their texts, sometimes “releasing” them under various Creative Commons licences. But you can only licence something that you own, and you can’t just go around claiming to own something that you don’t. To make such a claim is, or it should be, illegal. (Since copyright law is written almost entirely to protect the interests of content providers, it is not clear to what extent such a claim is fact illegal. But the principle is clear enough.)

The basic justification for copyright is that if we don’t copyright things, creators won’t get compensation, and the work will not be done. This is a dubious argument in the creative industries generally, since not only, as we have seen, is there no real evidence that copyright ensures a decent living for artists, but because artists are not motivated primarily by money.

This is even more applicable to Buddhism. No-one translates Buddhist texts for money; which is a very good thing, because if you did, you’ll be pretty disappointed. We—the monastics, academics, institutions, or private individuals—who do the work of translation do it out of love. There are vast quantities of translations that have been done and simply put out there, with no attempt at getting recompense. And even in the minority of cases where works are published commercially, the translators, and the many assistants who made these works possible, typically don’t get any income from them. Given this, it seems to me that the best way to produce high quality translations is to make our work freely available, so it can be copied, adapted, and improved. If funding is needed, for example, if someone wants to take time off work to complete a translation, we should rely on the Buddhist culture of dana, which has supported the maintaining and spreading of the texts for so long.

When I suggest that we shouldn’t use copyright on our texts, people say, but how do you stop them being misused? I just don’t get what the problem is. Does anyone really think that there are hordes of malicious people waiting out there to do awful things with Buddhist texts?

If, by some remote chance, someone does do something malicious with my work, such as, say, passing it off as their own, I’ll contact them and ask them to stop. If they don’t, I’ll rely on the power of peer pressure. I’ll write about it, and let people know that there’s a scam afoot. The perps will fade away soon enough. I’d never take someone to court for anything like that, so why issue an empty threat?

To me, it seems that this concern betrays a deeper misunderstanding of what copyright law is all about.

Copyright is not something that you can claim or not claim. It exists by law because you made a creative work. By operating under copyright law you are saying that anyone who violates this law is a criminal, and is potentially subject to very large punishments.

What I am suggesting is that this should not be a legal matter. We should dedicate our works to the Public Domain, via Creative Commons Zero or similar. That doesn’t mean that you necessarily support and encourage anyone to do anything they like with your work. It means that whatever someone does, you will not treat them as a criminal. If you don’t like what they do, contact them and ask them politely to stop. If you would like to issue some guidelines for use, do so. You can ask people to give proper attribution, or to not change anything, or to not use for commercial purposes. But you don’t have to make a legal issue out of these things.

I used to go along with the norm, thinking that it was the right thing to do. So I published my works under restrictive Creative Commons licences. But as I’ve learned more and my understanding of copyright has improved, now I don’t claim anything. I think if someone wants to do something with my work, great. Alexander Duncan of Chroniker Press took my Theragatha translation and made a nice printed edition: it’s terrific, buy one if you like! Markus Echterhoff of DhammaTime just made some modifications to my Open Sanskrit font, itself derived from Open Sans. Cool, download and use it.

Which brings me back around to something I alluded to earlier. Rather than relying on copyright, we should adapt the millenia-old means of negotiating usage of materials based on social interactions. And this is, once again, an area where technology has completely changed the situation. Creators can stay in touch with their audience to a degree that has not been possible since publishing was invented.

Copyright law is just bad psychology. The people who want your things are your fans. When you invoke copyright law, you are treating your fans like criminals. How do you think that’s going to work out?

The relationship between the creator and their audience is the single, irreducible fact of all public creative activity. You need a creator, and you need an audience. What you don’t need is a middle man. By making a faceless company the middle man, you distance the creator from their audience. When a fan copies a work, they don’t think they are harming the creator. They think of it as avoiding paying “the man”. If the natural creative relationship between artist and audience is restored, there will be a greater degree of respect and mutual support. This is proven by such innovations as Kickstarter, which shows that people are quite happy to pay for creative works, especially if they feel a sense of connection with the creator.

What I am suggesting is that innovative models like Kickstarter, or its Buddhist version dana.io, give us an example of how a new relationship between creator and audience can be forged. Lulu.com, the print on demand service, is another example. Rather than signing over the ownership of your work to Lulu, you retain ownership, and use whatever licence you like. Lulu is more like a contractor. You pay them for various services, basic ones like printing and distribution, and optionally for things like design and marketing. But they never own your work: you do.

Most people don’t realize it, but the internet runs on dana. Most of the servers that power the internet run on Linux, which is Free and Open Source Software. It was created, developed, and is still maintained by people who donate their work to the public good. Linux doesn’t just power the internet, it also underlies Android, and a whole range of other applications, from computers embedded in various devices, to the world’s fastest supercomputers. Why do you think the very best computer scientists in the world use Linux for their most performance-critical work? Because it’s better, obviously. Generosity is not just a nice idea, it creates better outcomes. Why? Because people do better work when you engage their positive nature than if you assume they are selfish.

Another innovative example is the TeX typesetting program developed by Donald Knuth. He released the software for free, as quality typesetting is a public good, everyone should be able to do it. And he made money by putting the detailed instructions in a book, the TeXbook, which was of course typeset in TeX. But he went further, by offering a reward for anyone who found a bug in his program. In this way he not only improved his work, he engaged a community of clever people who wanted to work with him.

There’s lots of other examples to be found. In all these cases, people found effective ways to use a fundamental principle of Buddhist psychology: that people work best when they are encouraged to do good. If you penalize them for doing something harmless, they just get annoyed.

Mammals spend an awful lot of energy on infants, on children, they spend nine months of our lives gestating, and then they get two decades of attention from us, because we’re putting all of our attention into this one thing we want to grow. Dandelions on the other hand will have thousands of seeds and they let them go where they like, they don’t really care. They will let go of 1,000 seeds, and 100 of them will sprout.

… the whole point of a digital frontier right now is that it’s a frontier, all the old rules are falling apart. Anyone who tells you they know what’s coming, what things will be like in 10 years’ time, is simply lying to you. None of the experts know—nobody knows, which is great.

When the rules are gone you can make up your own rules. You can fail, you can fail more interestingly, you can try things, and you can succeed in ways nobody would have thought of, because you’re pushing through a door marked no entrance, you’re walking in through it. You can do all of that stuff but you just have to become a dandelion, be willing for things to fail, throw things out there, try things, and see what sticks.

And, by the way, I fixed a spelling mistake in that quote. One dandelion just became a little more beautiful.

I’m proud to announce that the short book that Ven Brahmali and myself have finished, called The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist texts, is out now and published by the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies.

The book is essentially a collection of short articles that gather much of what we know about the historical background of Early Buddhism into one place. We believe that the debate on the authenticity of the texts in academic circles has been badly skewed by an unscientific emphasis on extreme scepticism, and it is time for the pendulum to swing back. Anyway, enjoy!

is not just a Buddhist thing. The Vatican has been enduring increasing levels of anxiety about the nuns, specifically the nuns of the US.

The leading representative body for nuns in the US, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, despite it’s canonical status within the Church has come under repeated fire and investigation for various heretical tendencies, which you can read about in the Vatican’s statement here, and the LCWR response here. The Vatican takes this so seriously that have set up a formal investigation, and the LCWR is talking about seceding from the communion.

The parallels with the situation regarding Wat Pa Pong and nuns are quite remarkable, for all the differences in the details. Despite the misleading and sensationalist headline, this article from AlterNet does a good job of explaning the background to the dispute. The author argues that the basic issue is about power, and it’s hard to fault this. Just as WPP criticized Ajahn Brahm and others for questioning the orthodoxy, so ‘obedience’ is foremost in the lessons that the bishops would have the nuns learn.

And the basic conflict is pretty much exactly parallel. The conservative group insists on keeping the medieval power structure in place, insisting that that, and that alone, is the truth; while the progressive party—more alive to the nuances and changes of history—look for inspiration in the heart of the teacher’s message for guidance in changing times.

It’s not just the LCWR that’s proving controversial. A leading academic nun in the US, Sister Margaret Farley, has come under fire for discussing sexual ethics in ways that the Vatican declares to be “not consistent with authentic Catholic theology”. As always, it’s best to read the Vatican’s original response, which is posted here.

Sister Farley is criticized for taking liberal positions on a range of matters relating to sexuality and relationships, namely masturbation, homosexual acts, same sex marriage, and divorce.

What’s interesting (or interestingly boring, depending on your perspective) is the wording of the criticisms. The document speaks of ‘doctrinal errors’, ‘the constant teaching of the Magisterium’, ‘the objective nature of the natural moral law’, ‘errors and ambiguities’ (Oh, those ambiguities! Can’t have them… Or can we?), ‘conform to Catholic teaching’, ‘This opinion is not acceptable’, ‘Sacred Scripture… presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law…’ ‘Legal recognition of homosexual unions… would mean… the approval of deviant behavior…’.

It’s all astonishingly unreconstructed. Despite Vatican 2 and the tremendous efforts by Catholics all over the world to genuinely engage with modernity within the framework of their faith, in this document the patriarchy just slams right down, no concessions granted. Modernity is just shrugged off like an annoying mosquito.

The Vatican document cites the ‘confusion’ among laity, a similar position to that which was expressed at the same sex marriage meeting I attended in April. This was also a key point in the official Amaravati document on the Five Points that subjugate the nuns. These were intended to allay the ‘confusion’ of the lay folk, which is why they were called ‘Points of Clarification’. For these patriarchies, allaying confusion means insisting on the One and Only Truth, which always has been and always will be, and which is fully embodied in the patriarchy itself.

The original document on the five points is here, and it’s worth reading it side by side with the Vatican documents. The Vatican, being older and more confident, expresses itself directly, whereas the Amaravati document ties itself in knots trying to apologize. But the end result is the same: obey or get kicked out.

There is, of course, the difficulty that many of the propositions insisted on by the patriarchy are unethical and harmful. They stem not from any timeless well of truth, but from well-understood social and historical conditions, conditions that no longer exist—except in the minds of the patriarchs. But as long as ‘modern’ notions can be dismissed by the sheer fact of their heterodoxy, they need not be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, Buddhists and Catholics go about our lives. We hear these pronouncements: sometimes they make us angry, sometimes they make us sad, sometimes they make us feel pity. But no one will ever be persuaded by them. They are a call to spiritual devolution, to a regression to lesser lives and diminished horizons. The spirit calls us on, and we won’t be shackled.

That’s ‘LaTeX’ the typesetting system, by the way, not the kinky shiny stuff. Sorry to disappoint.

One of the reasons for my prolonged absence from this blog the last couple of months is that I’ve been re-setting all my books using LaTeX. The only way I can get stuff like that done is by ignoring other stuff.

In this post I’d like to explain why Buddhists should use LaTeX. The basic reasons are simple. It’s free and open source (FOSS); and it’s the best.

Here’s the long version.

The Suttas often mention how beautiful it was to listen to the Buddha speak. He was supposed to have had a sweet voice like a cuckoo, clear, well-articulated, neither too loud nor too soft. It was not just the content of his speech, but the manner of it that was persuasive.

Just as spoken words can have qualities that are either attractive or repulsive, so too do written words. And just as the manner of presentation of spoken words substantially effects how they are received, so too with the written word. The craft of setting beautiful written text is called typography.

There is a long history of evolution of writing, which has gradually accumulated a ‘canon’ of rules that embody the best practices of presenting the written word. These style guides are not merely arbitrary, they arise from long cultural experience of what makes a text easy to read or not.

Similar principles have been followed in typography both East and West. See, for example, this inscription from King Ashoka, one of the earliest examples of Indian writing.

Without knowing anything about it, it is easily recognisable as writing. The lines are regular, with similar sized characters, and spaced so that the characters are clearly distinct, but not so far apart that they lose a sense of organic connection.

But as an early example, it is somewhat rough around the edges. The lines aren’t straight, and the characters not perfectly formed.

Here is a later, much more sophisticated piece of Buddhist typography, from 18th century Burma.

Here the typographic art has been raised to perfection. There is an unmistakable sense of care and precision about the piece; the harmony between the form and the content; the shapes of the letters, the integration of the decoration; the use of space; and so on.

This is what happens when care is taken to produce good typography. It’s not the expensive materials and decorations that matter, it’s the attention to detail.

And that is solely what typography is: attention to detail. Each little facet of the page is, in and of itself, trivial; but taken as a whole a well laid out page creates a harmonious form, which immediately, without fuss or pretension, informs the reader that they are reading something that is worth taking time over.

If you don’t get what good typography is, you won’t get the point of LaTeX. Typography leads a reader gracefully into the text, and invites them to care for the text’s meaning. Software is only a tool, which is there to help you accomplish this. So you have to know what you want. Learn what makes good typography first, then you’ll know what LaTeX is for.

In modern Buddhism, much of the typographical tradition is lost. This is, of course, a widespread outcome of the democratisation of text, so that anyone can now lay out text with a word processor. And it is exacerbated in Buddhism, where many of the books are produced by volunteers with no specialist training or interest in typesetting. And so virtually all the free distribution books in Buddhism (and many of the commercial ones) have bad typography. Mine included! (There are exceptions: the recent hard cover editions of Ajahn Chah’s teachings were produced in LaTeX, and they look lovely.)

To my mind, this is simply disrespecting the Dhamma. Do we think so little of the Dhamma that we are content to bash out any old crud as long as it fits on the page?

One of the basic issues underlying this is the use of word processors. Word processors are intended to do what their name says – process words. They are intended as tools for writing, and they can also be used for simple typesetting. If you want to do an invitation for your daughter’s 10th birthday, fine, use Word or LibreOffice. But if you want to make a book, use something designed for the job.

For a long time I used OpenOffice—later renamed LibreOffice—to lay out my books. Bit by bit, I tamed it and bent it to my will. And it did a pretty good job, once I learned how to do stuff like justify all text by hand using character styles.

What are you talking about? I hear you say. You just hit ‘justify’ and there the text is, all neatly lined up.

Ahh, no, it’s not quite like that. Word processors typically justify text by using a very simple algorithm. They see if the number of characters in a line fits the line (which of course rarely happens). If it doesn’t, they move the last word on to the next line and stretch out the remaining words to fit. The result is loose, sloppy text, with arbitrary gaps. Once you notice this, you can’t mistake it. It looks like crap.

This is how most Buddhist free distribution books are produced, using either (pirated) copies of Word, or LibreOffice, or sometimes a graphics program (since most of the volunteers who work on the books are graphic designers, not typesetters).

A proper typesetting system does much more. It evaluates what is the optimum way of distributing characters over an entire paragraph. Stretching here, compressing there, until the minimum ‘badness’ is achieved. And yes, ‘badness’ is a thing: it is the measure LaTeX uses to quantify how far from the ideal a justified line is.

Traditionally, all this stuff was done by professionals who hand set a page, using years of experience and study of their craft to produce beautiful, optimally laid-out pages. Look at an old book, and you’ll see a well-laid out page.

When computers started to be used for typesetting, the standards fell rapidly. So much so that one of the founding geniuses of computer science, Donald Knuth, took it upon himself to write the perfect typesetting program. It took six years, and he came up with TeX. This has has some modifications over the years, but is essentially perfected and stable.

Others took up the project and created LaTeX, which is essentially a programming language that uses a set of macros to make using TeX easier. Normally you don’t have to worry about TeX, just use LaTeX.

LaTeX is the standard for pretty much every scientific journal—it is particularly good at laying out equations—and is used widely in academia and elsewhere. There is, I have to admit, a geeky thrill in using LaTeX programs that written by NASA.

There is a good reason why such high-level institutions use LaTeX. It’s the best.

And there’s a good reason why most publishers use Abode’s desktop publishing software. LaTeX is, to put it mildly, unintuitive. That doesn’t mean it’s hard. I just means you have a learning curve before you can get it to do what you want.

Desktop publishing software can produce a good book, but it is not without its problems. The main FOSS program is Scribus, and while this is excellent for newsletters, magazines and the like, it lacks some basics for books, such as footnote support. Adobe software is good, but it’s expensive. And despite the premium price, in several areas it still produces output that is inferior to LaTeX. Of course the final result depends how you use the tool, but it is still true to say that LaTeX can produce output that is at least as good as Adobe.

A couple of months ago, I reached a crisis point with LibreOffice. There was so much formatting cruft in the file, it just wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to. Seriously, open up a years-old and oft-edited file one day and see what’s inside. It’s disgusting! (For a .odt file, rename the extension .zip, extract it, and open the .xml file with a text editor.)

Fortunately, I’m living with a serious geek, Ven Nandiya (he used to design physics engines for gaming). He learned LaTeX at Uni, and walked me through the basics.

Soon enough we were producing reasonably functional LaTeX documents, and I set out on redoing all my old books. I’ve done most of them, and am working on finishing touches now.

For those who want to try it out…

Okay, so hopefully some of you are interested to help create some high quality Buddhist books with LaTeX. But you have no particular computer expertise, and you don’t live with a geek god. LaTeX is very well documented, but most of the documentation is intended for serious users, and taking the first steps can be difficult. So here’s a few tips to get started.

First is obvious—do some googling and read the basics.

Second, install TexLive. This might already be present on your system. Essentially, TexLive is a distribution of software packages, documentation, and the like, that lets you produce LaTeX documents. It will be a large download, but it means that pretty much everything that you want is right there on your computer.

Third, play with creating some simple LaTeX documents. Here’s how. These instructions work for Linux, I’ve no idea if they apply on other systems.

You don’t need any special tools. I tried using LyX, which is supposed to make using LaTeX easier. But I found it frustrating and never got anywhere. I suspect it’s just that LaTeX is simply not suited to a WYSIWYG approach. There are various LaTeX editors available, but I find just using Gedit, a simple text editor (with code highlighting) and a terminal works fine.

The basic process is this. You edit the LaTeX file in a text editor. Then you use the terminal to process the file. That produces a pdf of the final product. Not so hard, right? Here’s the details.

Create a file on your desktop. Name it test.tex. Open the file with a text editor (notepad or the like) and paste in the following. Or better still, write it by hand so you get used to LaTeX.

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

\tableofcontents

\chapter{This is a chapter}

\lipsum

\lipsum

\section{This is a section}

\lipsum

\chapter{This is another chapter}

\lipsum

\lipsum

\end{document}

Save the document on your Desktop. Open a terminal. Write cd Desktop and press enter (capitals sensitive!). This opens the terminal in the Desktop directory. Write pdflatex test.tex and press enter.

Several files will automagically appear on your Desktop. Most of these are just logs and can be ignored. One of them will be a pdf file. But hold on: LaTeX counts page numbers on the first run through and creates a Table of Contents on the second run. So retype pdflatex test.tex in the terminal and press enter once more. (Hint: to cycle through previous commands in the terminal, use the up and down arrows on your keyboard.) Now open the pdf file. And Bingo! Your very own, LaTeX-produced pdf file.

Notice how many of the aspects of a book have been done automatically. Page numbers are there, a Table of Contents is there, and clearly formatted. The text is a reasonable size, well laid out, with plenty of white space.

So what’s going on here? Let’s have a look at what this code means.

\documentclass{book} % Commands in LaTeX start with a backslash. Every LaTeX document begins by specifying a document class (book, report, article, and so on). This tells LaTeX to use a set of defaults that are suitable. ‘Book’ is, obviously, the basic class for producing books, but the ‘memoir’ class is much more powerful and flexible and probably a better choice for serious booking. However, I only found this out after achieving most of what I wanted using the ‘book’ class, so I stuck with it.

\usepackage{lipsum} % ‘Package’ is the LaTeX (and more broadly Linux) word for a piece of software. You can specify any number of packages to use in a LaTeX document. These provide extra functionality and control. Think of them like plugins for your browser or apps for your phone. This one tells LaTeX to use dummy Lipsum text when the command \lipsum appears in the document. Tip: Packages and other LaTeX stuff (like document classes) come with excellent documentation, which you already have in your TexLive installation. To get the relevant documentation, just type in your terminal texdoc nameofpackage. No really, it’s that simple. Try texdoc lipsum and see for yourself. A nicely formatted pdf pops up explaining what the package is and how to use it.

\begin{document} % Should be obvious. Everything before this point is called the ‘preamble’, something like the <head> in an html page.

\tableofcontents % Inserts an automagically produced and formatted table of contents at this point.

\chapter{This is a chapter} %Inserts a numbered chapter heading.

\lipsum %Inserts dummy text.

\lipsum

\section{This is a section} % Inserts a numbered section heading.

\lipsum

\chapter{This is another chapter}

\lipsum

\lipsum

\end{document} %What it says. Note that everything on a line that follows a % on a line in LaTeX does not appear in the document. This is used for making comments in the file.

That’s a good start, but there’s much more to be done. What if we want to change something from the defaults? This is where things start to get tricky.

The defaults on LaTeX are brilliantly thought through (in the main), but they are obviously not suitable for everything. We will usually need to do things like change the page size, the margins of text on the page, and so on. And the default fonts are fine, but kinda stodgy (academia, you know), so we’ll want to liven things up a little.

So let’s just look at making a couple of basic modifications to the text we’ve produced so far.

You may have noticed that the pdf you produced has headers at the top of each page (except, intelligently, not the chapter title page). This is good, but the headers also appear on blank pages that have been inserted before the chapter title pages. This is because LaTeX by default follows the traditional practice of starting new chapters on a right hand page. You can change this behaviour in a number of ways. It is, of course, possible to keep the blank pages and eliminate the headers from them. But the simplest solution is to insert an ‘option’ in the specification of your document class that will eliminate the blank pages altogether.

Your original command was:

\documentclass{book}

Notice the two parts of this. The ‘command’, which is written with a backslash, and the ‘argument’, which is enclosed in curly brackets. Some commands also allow ‘options, which are inserted with square brackets between the command and the argument. In this case, we insert the option openany to instruct LaTeX to start a new chapter on any page.

\documentclass[openany]{book}

Run LaTeX again, and the annoying blank pages are gone.

For Buddhist texts, it is usually necessary to display unusual diacritical marks in Pali and Sanskrit, etc. Until recently, this was a hassle in LaTeX, as it was developed in the pre-Unicode days. As such it was limited to the fonts specially developed for LaTeX by its inventor, and using other fonts required special hacks.

There are a couple of recent extensions to LaTeX that can use any font installed on your computer very easily. One is XeTeX, but I had problems getting it to do microtypography. The other is LuaTeX, which is supposed to be unstable, but I have used it for lots of things with no problems. So, try this.

To your preamble (that’s the stuff between \documentclass and \begin{document}) add the following lines:

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Gentium Basic}

That tells LaTeX to use the package fontspec, allowing it to specify fonts, and chooses Gentium Basic as your main font. (You do have Gentium Basic on your computer, right? Don’t use plain old Gentium, as it doesn’t have proper bold face.) Then add some Pali or Sanskrit text after the \chapter, such as:

Now run LaTeX. But rather than using the previous command pdflatex, which tells LaTeX to make a pdf file, we use lualatex, which tells LaTeX to use LuaTex to create a pdf file. Don’t worry, it just works (assuming, of course you have TexLive installed). Enter: lualatex test.tex.

And there you have it. Gentium Basic used throughout. And nicely formatted Pali text.

But wait! Oops, the Pali text doesn’t justify properly. One of the words hangs over the line. OMG LATEX IS SUCH CRAP!!! Okay, now’s the time to breathe. Calm down. It’s only software.

What’s happening is that, whereas word processors and the like use a simple system to do line breaks, LaTeX is much more finicky. Normally this means that it handles things like justification and hyphenation really well. But in unusual cases—like an unknown language—it doesn’t know what to do. So rather than bodging up a quick fix, it leaves the problem so that you’ll notice it and can fix it up properly.

The simplest solution is to add \-, which tells LaTeX to hyphenate at that point. So saṅkhārappatiṭṭhaṃ becomes saṅ\-khārappatiṭṭhaṃ. Run lualatex again. The problem is gone, and the text justifies nicely. *Sigh of relief*

That’s enough to get started.

O, and one other thing. Most of the time you won’t be writing directly as LaTeX, but will be adapting something from somewhere else. Remember, LaTeX is for typesetting, word processors are for writing. So you want to take your .odt or .docx or .html file and turn it into LaTeX. Heh, heh! Good luck with that.

The problem is that word processors end up with a complex mishmash of style and structure information, and there’s simply no way to anticipate how that should be changed into LaTeX. Not least because much of the information—like page format, colors, and so on—need to be changed anyway, and the program can’t guess what information you want to keep. Html files should work better, as they are a structured format not dissimilar to LaTeX.

There are various ways of converting word processing files to LaTeX. Here’s some. But after experimenting we found the best way was to use Abiword, a light weight word processor that natively exports to LaTeX. It captures most of what needs to be kept—footnotes, text formatting like italics, chapters—with a minimal amount of cruft (unlike LibreOffice’s LaTeX export…).

Open your .odt or .doc file with Abiword and export to LaTeX. Open up the .tex file, clean any cruft (I said it produces minimal cruft, not none at all…), and you should have the start of a basic LaTeX file.

One thing Abiword doesn’t do very well is export non-standard characters. It recognizes a few of the common characters with diacriticals in Pali/Sanskrit, but in most cases it just omits them. Indeed, it doesn’t just problematize obscure characters, but even some common punctuation. This is because Abiword exports to vanilla LaTeX, which is not Unicode. But we’re using LuaLaTeX so we want the Unicode characters, not the code.

When Abiword gives you the Unicode for the missing character it’s easy enough to insert the relevant character using the methods described here. However in the cases where the code is simply missing, not only is the resulting file inaccurate, but there’s no simple way to search for the missing characters.

Whether this is a hassle or not depends on what you are doing. If you’re quoting lengthy Pali passages, as for example a chanting book, then never mind, you can just paste the text again from source. But if you have Pali/Sanskrit terms or quotes embedded in your text (like me), then it’s a nightmare to find and replace them.

Luckily enough, Ven Nandiya came to the rescue. He’s hacked Abiword to export the Unicode codes of all non-standard Unicode characters. Awesome! So now the LaTeX file still doesn’t have the proper characters, but it does have the unique Unicode code for each character. In addition, each code is preceded by xx, so you can find them easily in your document.

Which is great, except you don’t have it. Ven Nandiya doesn’t want to submit his hack to Abiword for inclusion, as he says it’s real quick & dirty. But if you want it, let me know.

One of the best aspects of LaTeX is that it has an enthusiastic and very helpful online community. That’s the beauty of free and open source—it’s all about helping each other. That’s the real reason why the Buddhist community—made up largely of enthusiastic volunteers who just want to help doing something good—should feel a sense of kinship with LaTeX and other FOSS projects.

We shouldn’t spend lots of money on programs designed for massive corporations. Nor should we pirate software, which is unfortunately endemic in Buddhism.

Lurking at the core of these bad practices is the subtle lack of confidence that secretly thinks that free and voluntary stuff is not as good.

But Buddhism itself puts the lie to that. Everything is, or was until very recently, Free and Open Source.

And just as Buddhism has produced and maintained some of the world’s most amazing things without the need for commercialisation, so too the FOSS community show that the same spirit of community co-operation is not just alive, but produces the best results.

Don’t believe me? Which encyclopaedia have you used the most recently—Wikipedia, or Britannica? Why? Because Wikipedia is better, obviously. But that’s too subjective. What about something really hard and technical and objective, like, say, supercomputers. No room for Mickey Mouse thinking there. Well, the designers of the world’s fastest computers would appear to be fans of FOSS: almost all of them use a derivative of the Linux FOSS operating system.

This is not a trivial thing, it is an amazing one. The voluntary work of people coming together to help out is still, despite all our corporatization, one of the major forces in human culture. It’s on the cutting edge of technology, just as it has been for 2500 years of Buddhism.

The methods and assumptions of Buddhist text-critical studies have come under challenge, indeed frontal assault, by the influential academic Gregory Schopen. His writings are deliberately provocative and sometimes brilliant. His basic approach in understanding Indian Buddhism may be summed up as a change in method, leading to different results.

In method, he criticizes the assumption of modern scholars that the study of Buddhism may be equated with the study of its texts, and instead proposes that the archaeological evidence should be granted priority. I think all would agree that he has a point here, but it is not obvious to me that previous scholars have been so negligent in this regard. As just one random example, Lamotte’s discussion of King Milinda occupies about seven pages.i The first three pages mainly survey the evidences of the coins and other material evidence, summed up as ‘as few fragmentary inscriptions’; the next three pages discuss the Milindapañha, an important work of the Middle Period preserved in Chinese and Pali; and the final page mentions a few references in later works. This seems reasonable to me; if anything I would have liked to see more discussion of some of the philosophical points raised in the Milindapañha, whose stance tends to be intermediate between the canonical doctrines and the developed positions of the schools.

As far as the results of research are concerned, Schopen says that the record of the bones and stones depicts a very different type of Buddhist monastic, one who is more worldly and human than the caricature of the ascetic hero striving for Nibbana alone in the forest. Since Schopen’s work constitutes the most influential and sustained critique of the kind of project undertaken in this book, it is worth considering his claims in some detail. If we weather this storm, we’ll be ready for anything.

Many of Schopen’s conclusions, I think, are obviously true. He is primarily interested in the ‘Middle Period’ of Indian Buddhism, that is, the five hundred years or so from the beginning of the Common Era. He uses the remnants of monasteries, stupas, graves, etc., together with Vinaya material, primarily from the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya in Tibetan (he makes little use of the Chinese sources), which he says stems from the same period and depicts much the same activity. These sources speak to us of monks and nuns who accumulate wealth, make substantial donations from their own wealth for building projects, promote devotional activity such as worship of stupas, images, and relics, are engaged in business transactions, contracts, and lending on interest, and are frequently at the beck and call of the lay followers for performance of rituals such as weddings, house blessing, and so on. All of this picture is quite convincing and needs little discussion here.

But while it is obviously true, I would also contend that it is truly obvious. All the activities that Schopen depicts may be plainly seen in the activities of the majority of the ordained Sangha in all traditions in the present day. Schopen merely points out that these conditions also obtained in the Middle Period of Indian Buddhism as well. While this may come as a surprise to academics with little contact with Buddhism in the real world, and constitutes an important critique of the fallacy of equating Buddhism with the idealized portrait in the sacred texts, it will come as no surprise for those of us who encounter Buddhism in the world every day.

Another of Schopen’s arguments that is well taken is that the average monk or nun, not to speak of the lay followers, may hardly even know of the scriptural texts. The scriptures may have only been known to a small elite of scholars, and the ideas therein might not be representative of the range of Buddhists. A few years ago I was staying in a forest hut belonging to a devoted, intelligent Thai Buddhist, who, when he was young, had been in robes for two and a half years. Once I visited a local monastery and borrowed copies of some of the Suttas. When I mentioned it to my friend, he looked absolutely blank: he had never even heard the words ‘Majjhima Nikāya’ or ‘Dīgha Nikāya’. Again it seems plausible that this situation, observable today, could have obtained two thousand years ago in India. But the argument should not be overstated. The Buddhist scriptures are big works. They must have required a substantial organization of monk-&-nun power to maintain, whether in oral form or even in the later written form, and so a large number of people must have known them. The number of inscriptions from ancient India is only a few thousand, and so can only represent a tiny fraction of scraps of ideas of all the Indian Buddhists. And those who are wealthy enough to donate religious monuments are hardly likely to be representative of the full spectrum of the Buddhist community. Anyway, as Schopen emphasizes, many of the donors are monks and nuns (according to Schopen, most of the donors are monastic, and in the Middle period, about half the monastics are nuns) who state that they are versed in the ‘Suttas’ or ‘Vinaya’ or ‘Tripiṭaka’ or ‘Nikāyas’; in other words, they are the same people as those who passed down the scriptures.

Schopen is scathing in his assessment of the ‘assumptions’ made by various Buddhist scholars. He characterizes the work of early, Victorian, scholars such as Oldenberg and Rhys Davids as ‘protestant’, and suggests that they have read their own biases into the Buddhist texts, depicting the Buddha and his Sangha much like rational, cultured European gentlemen.

This, too, is true, but it is hardly a valid criticism. Anyone familiar with Buddhist thought should accept that our understanding is always coloured by our beliefs and values. Fine, let’s point this out – but let’s not assume that we are an exception. I am a forest monk, and I believe that the Buddha and his early generations of ordained disciples were also forest monks and nuns. So when I look at the heritage of Buddhism, I naturally focus on this aspect.

Gregory Schopen is a highly paid academic from an overwhelmingly materialistic society, and so when he looks at the heritage of Buddhism he sees money, rocks, and material remains. When he does look at the texts – as any scholar, whatever their beliefs, must eventually do, for the information contained in the inscriptions is scanty – he focuses on the Vinayas, since they deal most directly with the material aspects of monastic life – buildings, etc. But the Vinayas themselves represent a movement from the spiritual to the material – they are about what monks and nuns do when they misbehave, and so taken by themselves they are misleading. We would not expect to gain an accurate vision of how an ordinary person leads their daily life today by reading law books.

Schopen contrasts the wealthy, developed monasteries with the poor, simple villages nearby. His agenda is, in the broadest sense, Marxist. I do not mean that in the slightest pejorative sense – I think it’s sweet that he dedicates his books to the ‘working men and women’ whose ‘labor paid for my scholarly leisure’. But he has little interest in the spiritual aspect of Buddhism, which puts him in a minority of those, at any time, who wish to learn the Dhamma.

It should be obvious that Schopen’s assumptions influence his conclusions, just as the assumptions of earlier scholars influence their conclusions. Wholesome states of mind leave no scar on the rocks. Meditation attainments are airily ephemeral. Insights into reality happen in the wispy world of the mind. If we were to accept Schopen’s methods unconditionally, we would have to abandon the very reason that most of us became interested in Buddhism. There would be no more reason to study ancient India than any other ancient culture. This may not be a problem for Schopen, but it is a big one for most students of Buddhism.

My primary interest is in spiritual practice, and my interest in the Ᾱgama Suttas stems from this: they describe a spiritual practice that I find inspiring, practical, and profound. I have tried, to my limited best, to live up to the ideals taught in that literature, and have invariably found that, when problems arise, they are due to my own inadequacies, not those of the teachings. I have also had close contact with a number of human beings whose inner radiance testified to the power of the Dhamma when lived to its fullest. Since this tradition that I belong to claims to stem from a genuine historical individual called the Buddha, it is important to investigate what truth there might be to this claim.

Schopen’s work contains much that is interesting and informative, but little that could be called inspiring. His writing is characterized by wit, scandal, and good yarns. Unfortunately, it is not always characterized by consistency, and we should examine some of his fracture lines. He rests his arguments heavily on the authority of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, a text he cheerfully admits to not having fully read. This Vinaya is ‘monstrous’ in size, perhaps 4000 folios in the Tibetan, and most scholars have taken it to be late, perhaps 500 C.E. Schopen would like to see this Vinaya dated earlier, around the beginning of the Common Era. On the other hand, the Theravāda Vinaya has been taken by most scholars to be early, but Schopen would also like to date that around the beginning of the Common Era. Thus the battle-lines are drawn. Schopen says that the discussion of the date of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya has been:

‘badly misdirected by a very red herring and the inattention of those who are supposed to be following the trail. In 1958 the great Belgian scholar Etienne Lamotte declared that this Vinaya, or code, was late, that “one cannot attribute to this work a date earlier than the 4th – 5th centuries of the Christian Era.” This pronouncement – even at its inception based on very shaky grounds – still proved almost fatal, for Lamotte was forced by his own further work to change his position – and he did so several times – but few scholars seem to have noticed. By 1966, Lamotte was in fact referring to the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya as a source of information for the first or second century of our era. Ironically, other scholars then, and for a long time after, continued to quote only the Lamotte of 1958.’ii

I must also confess inattention, for I have not followed the trail of Lamotte’s arguments and so must declare my incompetence to pronounce on the date of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. It might be noticed in passing, though, that the two positions ascribed to Lamotte in this passage are not necessarily contradictory. Given the evidently long period it would take to compile a vast compendium like the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, it is not unreasonable to maintain that the final redaction was in the 4th – 5th centuries C.E., but that it contains material inherited from a much earlier time. In fact, something of this sort could be said for almost all Buddhist literature. This is a phenomenon known as ‘intratextuality’, the ongoing life of a given text through a particular stream of tradition, which reflects the conservative nature of religious literature: the redactors valued ancient authority over creative expression and thus tended to work with material already to hand rather than inventing new material.iii In any case, there is nothing ‘ironical’ in the failure of some writers to notice Lamotte’s change of views: if scholars continue to quote from earlier, discredited theories this is a mistake, not an irony.

An example of true irony could be better seen from Schopen’s own work. In the same book as the above quote, he says this:

‘… this literature, the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, is itself considered by many to be late – Lamotte, for example, thinks it is the latest of the vinayas and says “we cannot attribute to this work a date earlier than the fourth-fifth centuries of the Christian Era” …’iv

Note that here Schopen says that Lamotte ‘thinks’ (present tense), thus precluding any later change of mind. This clanger needs little comment, apart from reminding us that Schopen, like the rest of us, is sometimes guilty of seeing what he wants to see.

While I am not competent to date the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, I must say that the passages quoted by Schopen himself frequently give me the impression of lateness. The elaborateness of the text may be partly explained, as Schopen argues, by cultural or other factors rather than by date, but the examples he gives fall well short of establishing this. As for specifics, we notice that the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya frequently mentions books and writing, while the Theravāda Vinaya mentions them rarely. This was one of the classic reasons the early European Buddhist scholars concluded (not ‘assumed’) the Theravāda was earlier, and as far as I can see the argument still holds good. Similar considerations apply when we see that the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya refers to worship of Shiva and Vishnu, while, as is well known, these deities are virtually unknown in the Theravāda canon. Schopen also argues that the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya evidences the influence of the Hindu Dharmaśāstras (legal codes), while the Theravāda does not. He says that this may be explained by the lack of influence of the Dharmasastras in Sri Lanka, and is therefore evidence that the Theravāda Vinaya was composed in Sri Lanka. While I agree, for other reasons, that the Theravāda Vinaya shows some minor Sri Lankan influence, I don’t think this particular argument is very convincing. The Dharmaśāstras themselves evidently date from well after the Buddha’s time, and the situation might as well or better be explained by the simple hypothesis that most of the material in the Pali was composed in India before the Dharmaśāstras became influential, and, because of the unimportance of the Dharmaśāstras in Sri Lankan culture, the Theravāda Vinaya did not have to be extensively revised.

Another target of Schopen’s critique is the vagueness or ambiguity of some Vinaya rules, which he suggests may have been deliberate.v It seems that the poor old Vinaya just can’t win: if it is definitive, it is rigid, and if it is flexible it is decadent. Again we might compare this with one of Schopen’s own little ‘ironies’:

‘In most cases, we can place the Vinayas we have securely in time: the Sarvāstivāda Vinaya that we know was translated was translated into Chinese at the beginning of the fifth century (404-405 C.E.). So were the Vinayas of the Dharmaguptakas (408), the Mahīśāsakas (423-424), and the Mahāsaṅghikas (416). The Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya was translated into both Chinese and Tibetan still later, and the actual contents of the Pali Vinaya are only knowable from Buddhaghosa’s fifth century commentaries.’vi

Does this remarkable assertion assume that the date of a text may be determined by knowing the date of its translation or commentary? That would certainly solve a lot of problems: I have beside me a translation of the Saṁyutta Nikāya dated 2000 C.E., so we can place that ‘securely in time’. Of course, the phrase is so vague – deliberately? – that Schopen escapes actually asserting that the dates of composition of the Vinayas may be determined from their translation or commentary. If that was the case, however, we would have to conclude, contrary to Schopen’s position, that the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya was later than the others, for its translation was later. Regarding the Theravāda Vinaya, it has been accepted, so far as I know, by all the scholars who have looked into the matter that Buddhaghosa was primarily a translator and editor, who worked with material stemming from a much older time, no later than 100 – 200 C.E. If the commentarial material dates from then, the Vinaya itself must be considerably earlier.vii

An important part of Schopen’s argument is that there is little or no early – pre-Common Era – evidence for Buddhist monasteries of the developed sort that are depicted in the Vinayas. This is, for him, a sign that the Vinayas were compiled in the ‘Middle Period’. He notes that the words vihāra and āvāsa, which are commonly used of monasteries, really mean little more than ‘dwelling’, and give us little information about what kind of institution is being discussed.viii

However he neglects to notice that the main terms used of a monastery in the Pali Suttas are vana (woodland grove) and ārāma (park); the fact that they are used together in the name of the most famous monastery of all (‘Jeta’s Grove, Anāthapiṇḍika’s Park’) suggests that they may be synonyms. These, of course, have a much more specific meaning – evidently the main form of Buddhist monasticism in the Suttas was the forest monastery.

Even today, the typical forest monastery consists of small huts or caves scattered through the forest, with a larger wooden sala for communal activities, and some buildings for stores, kitchen, etc. Such an institution would leave little or no evidence for an archaeologist to uncover.

Schopen does not consider the possibility of a ‘middle way’ between the large, institutionalized vihāras that are such a feature of the archaeological record of Buddhism, and the life of the lonely sage in the forest. It would seem that the forest monastery offers such a ‘middle way’. Forest monasteries can evolve to a high degree of sophistication in their internal organization, such as is described in the Vinayas, and usually have a high regard for authentic practice of the Vinaya. They often do not engage in large building projects, not because they do not have the resources or the know-how – forest monks are often more educated and better supported than the city monks – but because they want to live simply.

This is just a suggestion, and more careful work on the Vinayas – including the Chinese – has to be done to see if this suggestion has any cogence. It is obviously tenuous to draw such parallels between Buddhist practice in such far-distant times and places. But Schopen himself draws many instructive parallels between practice in Buddhist and Christian monasticism, which would seem to be no less distant. And as I have noted above, many of Schopen’s more acceptable findings do find clear parallels in contemporary Buddhism.

Schopen dismisses the ‘perishable materials’ argument for the lack of early monasteries, saying that the earliest archaeological evidence we do possess shows us a monastery in the time of Asoka that is ‘poor and unimpressive’, ‘crudely made of “rubble”.’ix He asserts that: ‘the earliest extant remains of monastic residential architecture, like the earliest cult images in stone, show a tradition still struggling, in this case towards order, still lacking a sense of functional organization and structured use of space. Such a tradition – again like that which produced the early extant cult images – does not suggest a long period of development or directed experimentation in wood or other perishable materials preceding it.’x

But this argument is also circumvented by the forest monastery hypothesis – when living in widely scattered dwellings in the forest it is not necessary to develop such a structured sense of space. What seems to be happening here is that the monastics are, for the first time, living in close proximity. This might be due to a number of factors – perhaps there were too many Buddhist monastics in that period. But some of the early sites mentioned by Schopen also share another significant feature: the monastic dwellings are near a stupa. This might suggest that these are the first monasteries for whom the devotional practices described by Schopen are becoming important.

What is perhaps more relevant for our current purposes, however, is that this argument exposes yet another of Schopen’s ‘ironies’. He assumes that the emergence of sophisticated architecture or fine arts requires a substantial prior period of development – a most reasonable assumption. But is not the same the case in literature? Schopen wants to put very sophisticated literary tracts like the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya in the early Middle Period. But surely such works must have required a lengthy evolution. Similarly, we know for certain (from the dates recorded for the Chinese translations) that the earliest Mahāyāna Sūtras date from no later than the beginning of the Common Era. These too are sophisticated literary and philosophical products, which are, to a large degree, a critical response to some aspects of the early schools, especially the (Sarvāstivāda) Abhidhamma philosophy, and also to such monastic practices as are detailed in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, as Schopen himself argues.xi The Abhidhamma texts themselves are sophisticated literary works that are in turn based on the material found in the early Suttas. So the early Sutta material – not necessarily the exact collections in the form we have them today, but the main doctrinal material – must be several philosophical generations before the Mahāyāna Sūtras. Again, this conclusion, not ‘assumption’, was one of the classical reasons for assigning a relatively early date to the Nikāyas/Ᾱgamas, and nothing Schopen says really affects this.

Schopen tries to show that the forest monastic life was little different from settled monastic life in general. He does this by quoting a passage from the Vinaya that describes the lovely, luxurious forest dwelling of a certain Venerable Udāyin, where many people would go to visit him. Schopen says that this is apparently how the compilers of the Pali Vinaya saw the forest life.xii Incredibly, he makes no mention of the fact, known to every Grade 1 Vinaya student, that Udāyin is the archetypal ‘bad monk’, whose appalling behaviour prompted the formulation of many Vinaya rules. On this occasion, Udāyin gropes and sexually harasses a woman who comes to visit him, prompting the laying down of yet another rule on his behalf. This part of the story, however, is discreetly omitted by Schopen as he tries to depict Udāyin as a regular forest monk.

While it is obvious that the cult of relics and so on played a large part in Buddhist practice from the Middle Period, Schopen wants to discredit the received opinion that the early texts, and hence early Buddhism, do not include the relic cult. He ends up clutching at some embarrassingly flimsy straws.

For example, he points to a passage in the Satipaṭṭhāna-saṁyutta where the novice Cunda, after the passing away of Venerable Sāriputta, takes his bowl and robes and goes to tell Venerable Ᾱnanda.xiii Schopen says that the PTS edition (which I do not have) has a variant reading from a Burmese edition that includes the phrase dhātuparibhāvana.xiv Schopen admits that the meaning is obscure, but it ‘almost certainly contains a reference to relics’. This is dubious, for dhātu rarely if ever means ‘relic’ in this strata of literature. The VRI CD that I am using does not have dhātuparibhāvana, so it seems that this reading does not represent the mainstream Burmese tradition. Thus far Schopen’s argument is flimsy, but not necessarily wrong. But then he goes on to say that the commentary appears to have a reference to relics, since it includes the term dhātuparissāvaṇa. Parissāvaṇa means ‘water strainer’, and dhātu here means ‘relics’, though the compound ‘relics-&-water strainer’ does seem a little odd.

Anyway, the matter is clarified by the very next sentence of the commentary, which is ignored by Schopen. This says: ‘But in the text (pāḷī) it just says “Here are his bowl and robes”.’ In other words, the commentary explicitly states that the original text did not mention anything other than the bowl and robes. Thus it seems almost certain that paribhāvana was not in the original text; it was probably read back into the text by garbling the commentary (by a monk whose reading rivals Schopen in carelessness).

Schopen does not refer to the Chinese parallel, which is very close to the Pali, and which similarly mentions just the bowl and robes. He says that the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya version of the incident does refer to relics, although he admits that the phrase is not a cognate of either of the Pali terns with dhātu in them. This makes it seem like an independent later development, not a common inheritance.

Schopen is right on the mark when he says that ‘this will require further study to sort out’. I hope it has now been sorted out. Rather than being ‘virtually certain’ that the Pali here has suffered loss – or as Schopen insinuates, deliberate suppression – it is absolutely certain the Pali and the Chinese and the Theravāda commentary all agree that the original account of Sāriputta’s death does not mention relics. Much later the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya and perhaps the Pali commentaries added the mention of relics. Thus this context, as with many others, suggests that the Mulasarvāstivādin Vinaya has more in common with the Theravādin commentaries than with the canon.

Schopen’s work offers us further lessons in ‘irony’ in the discussion of the term paribhāvita.xv He shows that several inscriptions and late textual sources describe the relics of the Buddha as being ‘infused’ or ‘permeated’ (paribhāvita) with such qualities as ethics, samadhi, understanding, and release. This suggests a quasi-magical conception of relics in this period. Schopen discusses the term in some detail and offers several references from the Pali canon showing a naturalistic usage of the term, for example a chicken sitting on eggs and ‘imbuing’ them with warmth. But, incredibly, he avoids all mention of the most well known occurrence of the term: the frequently repeated statement of the Buddha in the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta:

‘Samadhi imbued with ethics is of great fruit, great benefit; understanding imbued with samadhi is of great fruit, great benefit; the mind imbued with understanding is rightly released from defilements.’xvi

Not only does the term paribhāvita appear repeatedly, but it does so specifically describing a list of dhammas similar or identical with those repeatedly mentioned in the inscriptions quoted by Schopen.

The implications of this are slightly worrying. Schopen has built a successful career largely on his pioneering research into the nature of the cults of the stupa and relics in Indian Buddhism. The prime canonical reference for these practices is the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta, which describes the distribution of the Buddha’s relics. One of the most famous and prominent passages in this text repeatedly uses the term paribhāvita in connection with ethics, samadhi, understanding, and release. Schopen discusses at length the use of paribhāvita in inscriptions to describe relics that are imbued with ethics, samadhi, understanding, and release. He gives several references to unrelated uses of the term in the Pali canon, but avoids all mention of the usage in the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta.

What is going on? Has Schopen not even read the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta, the main source text in his own special field? Or might we conspiratorially wonder whether Schopen has deliberately suppressed the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta reference (just as Schopen alleges the redactors of the Pali canon suppressed mention of relics and stupas)?

Once the connection with the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta is noticed, it is obvious that the inscriptions are, in fact, quoting from or referring to this specific text. Note that the passage on ethics, samadhi, understanding, and release in itself has no connection with the relic cult. If it existed as an isolated fragment or in another context there would be no reason to associate this passage with relics. Only when taken as part of the overall narrative of the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta would it be possible to form an association between the passage and the Buddha’s relics.

To be sure, the implications of the usage in the inscriptions is radically different from that in the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta. In the discourse it describes spiritual qualities to be developed by a living person, whereas in the inscriptions it seems to mean the magical infusion of relics with mystic power. This obviously suggests that the earlier, rational, psychological teaching has been altered – dare I say ‘corrupted’? – by magical conceptions. This is a straightforward reading from the evidence, not an imposition of ‘protestant presuppositions’. Of course, this conclusion would be impalatable to Schopen, because it would suggest, firstly, that the discourses, or at least the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta, were actually known to a variety of Indian Buddhists and influenced their beliefs; and secondly that the picture he paints of the Middle Period is representative of Buddhism in its decadent, materialistic phase, rather than the psychological spirituality of the early teachings.

Schopen’s key inscriptional and textual sources for this quasi-magical use of paribhāvita are dated to around the first century of the Common Era. By this time, the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta must have been composed, and already be well-known and influential. This must have happened long enough for some of the central messages to be radically reinterpreted, and for these reinterpretations to have gained wide currency. The Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta evidences later elaboration, and, despite the fact that several sectarian versions are known, most scholars do not place it among the earliest strata of the Suttas. So if the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta was in existence significantly before the Middle Period, many other discourses must be even earlier. So we must be grateful to Schopen for, yet again, inadvertently offering us another proof of the existence of the early Suttas well before the Middle Period.

Schopen’s failure to notice this stems from his wilful enslavement to his own methodological presuppositions. He has a religious faith in ‘hard facts’, things that ‘actually’ exist in stone and bone. As normal, when a particular means of knowledge is given absolute priority in this way, it leads to philosophical distortions and a blindness to the broader perspective. Schopen castigates those who would render archaeological evidence subject to texts, since archaeological evidence can be located in place and time, and represents what was said by ‘actual’ people (as if those who wrote the texts were not ‘actual’ people).

One of his pervasive unexamined assumptions is the reliability of archaeological evidence. I am no expert, but it does seem to me that archaeologists, like those in any field of science, are engaged in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, and to do so must rely on sometimes tenuous inferences. Schopen remarks several times that the sites he is referring to have not been fully excavated, or were poorly reported, or that there is uncertainty as to dating. There is no reason why the inferences derived from such methods are more reliable than those derived from textual sources.

Just one example will suffice here. Schopen quotes an inscription that refers to the setting up of an image of the ‘Blessed Lord, the Buddha amitābha’ (bhagavato buddha amitābhasya).xvii He says that this is the only inscriptional reference to Amitabha in India, and constitutes one of the few ‘hard facts’ we know about his cult in India.

The inscription is interesting, and it is useful that Schopen brought it to light. But what does it mean? The inscription says an image was set up by a certain Nāgarakṣita or Sāmrakṣita, who wishes that ‘by this skilful root may all beings attain unexcelled knowledge’. Such references to ‘all beings’ and ‘unexcelled knowledge’ are typical of Mahāyānist inscriptions; but the present inscription is very early, apparently 200 years prior to the widespread appearance of Mahāyānist inscriptions.

Schopen assumes that amitābha refers to the Buddha of that name in the well-known Sūtras so popular in China. Thus, as usual, he is unable to say anything meaningful about the inscription without the context provided by the texts.

His assumption is reasonable, but is not necessarily true. ‘Amitabha’ means ‘infinite light’, and is virtually identical with a word used in the Pali tradition to describe an order of deities: appamāṇābhā devā, the ‘deities of measureless light’. It is possible that amitābha was used of certain deities, and from there became an epithet of the historical Buddha, and only later the human and divine elements were fused into ‘Amitabha Buddha’. In other words, the inscription might not be a reference to ‘the’ Amitabha, but might simply be a descriptive epithet of Śakyamuni, representing a stage in the development towards Mahāyāna ideas.

I am not arguing that this is in fact the case, but am merely pointing out that, in the absence of context, it is impossible to know which interpretation is correct. Any meaningful statement on the matter must be based on an inference, on what we think is the more reasonable interpretation, not on the ‘hard facts’.

I beg leave here to give an example from my own experience. Once I was staying at a forest monastery where the practice was to inter the cremated remains of the monastery supporters in the monastery wall. A hole was made in the wall, and with a simple ceremony, the ashes were placed in and covered with a brass plaque. Someone, perhaps an archaeologist of Schopenesque bent, might come at some time later and notice a peculiar feature of the plaques. In a certain section, that closest to the entrance and dated earliest, the plaques say ‘Rest in Peace’, a typically Christian saying. The later plaques, however, say ‘May she attain Nibbana’, which is obviously Buddhist. What is going on? Did the monastery change from Christian to Buddhist? Is this evidence of an obscure sect of antipodean ‘Buddho-Christians’? Might we suspect darkling intrigue, a hidden tussle for power between two opposed groups of monks, vying for the funds from the different religious communities?

Happily, I was there at the time, and can answer ‘none of the above’. These plaques were ordered from a shop whose normal business, this being in a predominately Christian country, was to make plaques for Christian burials. So they came with a typically Christian burial slogan. The monks simply didn’t give the matter any thought, until it was pointed out that a Buddhist saying would be more appropriate, and so one was invented. That’s all there was to it.

Incidentally, we did not really believe that saying ‘May she attain Nibbana’ on the burial plaque would really help the lady concerned to attain Nibbana; it just seemed like a nice sentiment.

Now compare this concrete, dateable, placeable, ‘actual’ evidence with, say, some of my own essays that are available on the Net. They have no date, no place, no concrete existence at all. Yet I regard them as a more reliable and accurate guide to my beliefs and practices than those messages on the plaques at the monastery where I stayed.

Schopen dismisses the idea that shared passages in a text are evidence of early, pre-sectarian material. He prefers the hypothesis that shared material is evidence for later sharing, levelling and standardizing of material. Thus he apparently believes that when the Buddhist monastics lived in close proximity in the Ganges valley, speaking a common language, and regarding each other as being all of one community, they developed different diverging scriptures, but when they were spread widely over ‘greater India’, speaking different languages, and regarding each other as belonging to different communities, they ‘levelled’ and ‘standardized’ their scriptures. This is not inherently plausible, or even vaguely rational. He has no real evidence for this from the Indic context, and so attempts to justify it with reference to Christian history; but the Bible is accepted with slight variations as canonical by all Christians, whereas the writings of later theologians and teachers are accepted only by certain denominations and are rejected by others.

It is as if we were to come across people living in two neighbouring villages, each speaking a slightly different dialect, with customs, beliefs, lifestyle, and physical appearance that were similar, and a shared myth that asserted that they sprang from the same origins. Schopen would point out that there is no ‘hard evidence’ that they ‘actually’ share a common ancestry. The ‘actual’ situation is that there are two different villages, with divergent languages, beliefs and so on. Any ‘assumption’ that the observable similarities derive from a common ancestry is sheer speculation. After all, there is plenty of evidence that cultures tend to homogenize, to move away from diversity towards similarity. The only reasonable explanation would seem to be that here we have two different peoples, and the similarities in their cultures and physical appearance is evidence of cultural interchange and intermarriage between two originally disparate communities. This description might sound like a caricature of Schopen’s ideas, but I honestly believe it is not.

One of Schopen’s main arguments in favour of his ‘later borrowing’ thesis is the story of the stupa for Kassapa Buddha at Toyika. Wynne has shown that this argument is deeply flawed. Schopen compares various versions of the same story, but conveniently confines to a footnote the fact that, while the other versions occur in the Vinayas, the Theravāda version is found in the Dhammapāda commentary. This turns out to be yet another piece of evidence that the Theravāda tended to close their canon early, placing later material in their commentaries.

Not only is this a fatal error in one of Schopen’s key arguments, but it is, as Wynne points out, a misrepresentation of the methods of the ‘higher criticism’ that Schopen is so dismissive of. Normally scholars will take the congruence of the canonical, not the commentarial, literature as evidence of pre-sectarian remnants.

This is not the only place that Schopen misrepresents his opponents. He asserts, for example, that the ‘cardinal tenet of this criticism states, in effect, that if all known sectarian versions of a text or passage agree, that text or passage must be very old; that is, it must come from a presectarian stage of the tradition.’xviii The repeated use of ‘must’ is highly misleading. The sharing of material is only one of many independent criteria that are regularly employed to support and check each other. I do not know of any scholar who would make the blanket assertion that shared material ‘must’ be earlier. It is no more than a reasonable hypothesis that forms a basis for further research.

In addition, this description is by no means the ‘cardinal tenet’ of textual criticism. In fact, the foundations for modern Indology were laid by 19th century scholars such as T. W. Rhys-Davids and Hermann Oldenburg. At that time there was almost no knowledge of Chinese or Sanskrit texts, and so the comparative method of comparative not used at all. Rather, those scholars relied on linguistics, the internal evidence of the Pali texts, broader knowledge of Indian history, and archaeology.

Compared with the situation in Bible studies, the quantity of Buddhist literature is so vast, the subject matter so obscure, and the amount of serious research so small, that it is premature to discard any methodology. While the early scholars may not have given due weight to the archaeological evidence, they must be forgiven, in consideration of the sheer time and effort it takes to learn the Buddhist languages and read the texts. They have at least given us a reasonably coherent and satisfying working model of Indian Buddhism. If we were to accept Schopen in his more radical moods we would be rendered incapable of saying anything about the Buddha or his teachings, and would be left with no idea as to why there were, in the later periods, such widely spread religious schools claiming inspiration from a common Teacher, sharing a similar lifestyle, and borrowing wholesale each other’s scriptures, at the same time as vigorously arguing with each other over what the scriptures mean.

Here’s a review of Justin Thomas McDaniel’s Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words, a study of monastic education in northern Thailand and Laos. The book looks fascinating, but even from the review you can get a sense of the nuanced, changing, and variable situation in monastery education throughout these regions. Unfortunately the review doesn’t give any indication as to what is actually in the manuscripts discussed, apart from the fact that some of them draw on the Dhammapada. But it does shed a little more light on the evolving shape of Thai/Lao Buddhism in the colonial era, dispelling the anti-historical illusion of a consistent, standardized, constant form of “Thai Buddhism” which has been the same way “since the beginning”.

There’s been some discussion here on samatha/vipassana, sparked in part by my post on A Swift Pair of Messengers a few days ago. This is, of course, one of the old Theravadin family arguments. I’d like to congratulate the posters so far on their civil and engaging responses.

The spark behind writing SPM was simply this: that I had grown bored and frustrated with partial and inadequate ways of approaching this problem, which really is central to how we practice the Dhamma. Everything I had read, every conversation i had been involved in, had relied on one or two isolated passages, or on the discredited commentarial system of interpretation.

In writing SPM I thought that there was a better way. No, we cannot hope to solve every problem; but we can at least improve the quality of dialogue.

Since that time, every criticism of my findings that I have seen has been based on two things.

1. Completely ignore every argument and piece of evidence that I have so painstakingly assembled.
2. Invoke some obscure, irrelevant, or dubious passage from the suttas, a half-remembered quote, or an opinion from some teacher or other.

As we can all see from the response on this blog, this is still exactly what is happening.

This is not good enough. It is simply not adequate to lay out the spiritual path for Nibbana on such half-baked premises. This stuff matters, folks. Get real.

So, in the interests of getting realer, let me suggest some guidelines for debate.

1. Read A Swift Pair of Messengers.
2. Engage with and debate the contents and arguments that I have put forth there.

Disagree by all means. But do your homework – I did. When I say something like, ‘There is no path of dry insight in the suttas’, this is not because I am relying on some vague memory of something i might have heard sometime. It’s because, ten years ago, when I was researching this book, i systematically searched through every page of the Pali canon for passages dealing with samatha and vipassana. I believe I have identified every significant passage. Of course, I may well have missed something, and may well have misinterpreted some things. Fine, if that is so, point it out. But don’t just ignore the work that has been done.

Let’s have a debate – an informed, reasonable debate. Perhaps, then, we might get somewhere, rather than just rehashing the same old same old.

Hi all bloggists. Just to let you know, I haven’t been checking the blog for the past week or so, so if your comments haven’t appeared, don’t worry, I’ll get around to it soon.

I’ve been putting together a new version of our decrepit old Santipada site. Like most of Santi’s web presence this was built on googlepages, which served us well for a few years, but which is now falling apart. Since I started this blog, I’ve learnt a little about WordPress, and, with substantial assistance, have learnt to do a few simple websites. We’ve rebuilt the Santi FM website on WordPress, as well as the Australian Sangha Association. The latest is Santipada, the Santi FM ‘in-house’ publishing arm, currently at http://santifm.org/santipada/ (but soon to be redirected to santipada.org).

I’ve had a number of ideas for how a good reading site should be built, and I’m glad to say I’ve been able to implement just about all of them.The aim of the site is to present writing in the best possible way on the web. To accom­plish this I have started with a text-oriented WordPress theme, The Erudite, and modified it to further enhance it as a writer’s platform. The appearance has been tweaked, and the font size increased. I’ve paid detailed attention to typographic niceties, like ‘hanging quotes’, proper verse layout, tables, footnotes, semantic markup, and so on. For seamless display of diacrit­icals in Indic terms, Gentium Basic is used throughout, delivered using @font-face by kernest​.com.

The theme has been de-bloggified, removing comments, dates, and so on: I’m after a lasting repos­itory of quality writing, not a changing diary. If you want to discuss stuff, use this blog.

There are a few exper­i­ments: notice that hovering the cursor will highlight the text, changing the dark grey text into black; this is because some readers find even dark grey difficult to read. In addition, this can serve as an attention focuser. On single posts, the same action will display automatic paragraph numbers to the side. This is because I am conscious that any writing these days will be published in a variety of media, and for reference sake texts should be marked according to paragraphs, which are a genuine textual entity, not pages, which are merely an artifact of the technology the text is presented in.

Posts will be made available in several formats: as well as the basic html for web viewing, they are, or will be, in pdf (for downloading and printing) and Scribd (for, well, whatever people use Scribd for…). More formats coming…

The content is, for the most part, my old essays taken from the earlier santipada, with a few additions. In time I will adapt my books in a similar way. I intend to use that site as a repository of quality writing, so from time to time I may take the most lasting of my blog posts, polish them up, and include them.

For now, a treat for all you blog readers. The first post on the new site is a new piece of imaginative writing, now published for the first time: ‘Dreams of Bhaddā’. I hope you like it….